While visiting Deakin University, I was able to interview Jeremy West, Senior Audio Visual Engineer and Tech Lead in the eSolution Team. He kindly answered questions about a range of topics including how new audio video technologies are coming to Deakin University and how these technologies converge with other IT solutions.

In the interview, Jeremy talks about how Deakin University is moving its traditional audio/video over HDBaseT to over IP solutions. He also talks about moving to cloud control for AV teaching space control and using analytics that come back from these systems to improve academic user experience. Collaboration has been key to this move to IP AV solutions, working with their network engineering and systems teams.

I will be blogging about my further conversations with Jeremy on other AV developments at Deakin.

Sebastian Barnes was funded to attend this event as a 2017 UCISA bursary winner

SCHOMS Annual Conference 2017

After a morning of presentations on Day Two of the SCHOMS 2017 conference, which I was able to attend courtesy of a UCISA bursary, I went on to visit the conference exhibition. After a brief look around one product caught my eye, the Sahara Clevertouch. The Sahara Clevertouch is an interactive touchscreen for education with an integrated Android system, 4k screen, airplay and onboard drawing, ideal for presenting to an audience or demonstration work within a class. It has professional casters, which can drop down to the ankles, as well as only weighing 94kg; this is considerably lighter than the c-touches (interactive touch displays) within Leeds Beckett. I tend to prefer Apple products and technology due to the intuitive nature of the interfaces, however this product has a quite smooth, quick, slim and easy to navigate user interface based on an Android system.

After a great exhibition, I had some lunch and then it was time for a tour of Keele University. One very interesting building, but not for the faint hearted was the Clinical Education Centre. This building is for medical students who can practice on fake and real dead bodies, however we were there to look at the technology. The technology demonstrated how well AV had developed over the years and the cost implications of it. We were also introduced to a 3D lab with virtual reality capabilities, hand crafted within Keele. I didn’t get to use this product, however I watched others. To use this a student would put on the headset and they would be within their own patient ward, having to deal with a variety of patients, reading records and attending to their needs. A great bit of kit which was ideal for medical student experience.

As a UCISA bursary award winner, I was able to attend SCHOMS Annual Conference at Keele University. After an introduction on Keele University, we moved onto a presentation ‘Creating learning activities and spaces for digital age learners’, regarding the ways in which a class or lecture is delivered to students and how this can be improved. Laura Hancock, Keele University, suggested implementing an idea called “lecture flipping”. As a student, this sounds great! Less time in a lecture theatre and more time in a classroom being able to communicate ideas with each other. Currently at Leeds Beckett this idea is already implemented, with one-hour lectures and one two-hour tutorial per week. However, if the lecture was assigned as homework and within our lecture the hour was more discussion based then this would be better; for myself personally, but some people prefer to learn from listening rather than doing!

The exponential rise of technology-driven change means digital strategies are no longer merely support acts to primary university and college strategic plans. Here, UCISA Chair David Telford argues that, with digital transformation key to the future student experience and learning journey, it’s time for CIOs and Vice Chancellors to push digital strategies into pole position in business planning:

Here’s a bold statement.Digital strategy is not just about the numbers or how much it costs to run your IT. Unless and until your university fully gets to grips with technology’s contribution to the student experience and the learner journey, both will be severely impaired.

IT is now fundamental to the student experience and learning. Technology use is about far more than IT-driven processes and an aid to organisational efficiency and effectiveness. It’s integral to the whole student lifecycle.

Today, the knowledge of how best to leverage technologies to enhance teaching and the academic and research agendas is not coming from the academics, it’s coming from the IT department. In integrating our academic agenda at my own institution, we’re spending more and more time in the classroom and supporting students, even early in their studies and as postgrads, in leveraging technology to access information and research materials.

The digital literacy and digital skills gap in universities that’s growing year-on-year is well documented – but this is not knocking the lecturers. Things are moving so quickly that the skills of academics are just not keeping pace. Like many other sectors, we are in transition. Digitisation is growing and technology brings change. It is disruptive to past ways of working. Taking best advantage requires not only skills but a cultural shift to a change-ready and agile mindset.

So what’s the future of your university? How can a digital strategy ensure that value is best provided to students, lecturers and researchers?

There are a few lessons from the wider world. In less than a decade, Netflix has transformed from a DVD sales and rental business, to media streaming and latterly film and television production and online distribution. They have successfully leveraged advances in technology and been shrewd in understanding changing customer expectations and unmet needs.

How does this link to our university communities and their expectations? Well it’s clear that they live in a connected Netflix world. Our smartphone students inhabit multiple online communities and communicate via Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. They collaborate and share instantly and naturally. Established systems like email and intranets are clunky in comparison. Our business systems often lack the immediacy of app-based solutions and the ability to collaborate on joint decision making or visualising the data.

And what about staff? A recent Facebook-sponsored Deloitte survey of business managers showed only 14 per cent of those responding were fully satisfied with their organisation’s ability to connect, communicate and collaborate with 65 per cent citing digital technologies as the way forward. Would the statistics for higher education alone really be that much different? Certainly, both TEF and the NSS highlight the need for IT to be actively involved in the staff and student experience at all levels.

Working in a multi-campus university, one of the issues I’ve faced is that we’ve yet to get our communities fully joined up. We don’t have a fully-fledged research community and we also don’t have a strong sense of community around the subject areas we are known for. Going forward, it is technology that is going to make the difference in these areas. But even in this, we have to collaborate. This is not a nut IT can crack alone.

Trying to predict the future is a fool’s errand – but we can prepare for it and an effective digital strategy that looks beyond the three or five-year horizon of a typical university business strategy is crucial. While it’s important to bring on the skills of individual academics, we also need to promote recognition of the fact that IT is now very much a part of learning delivery systems. Pedagogy is no longer the sole domain of the lecturer.

The future is very much about collaborative delivery alongside other institutional agencies. Depending how you are structured, that can be as much with library colleagues and learning technologists as with academics and students. For all of us, it’s about thinking across multiple disciplines and multiple service boundaries. It’s about getting out of our comfort zones and addressing questions of collaboration and service delivery that engenders skills development and makes a tangible contribution to the digital learner journey.

The role and dimension for IT in student success is huge and this is a theme that I know some fellow UCISA members have already included in TEF submissions using evidence of digital literacy and engagement with IT systems to show how they have contributed to improved learning outcomes. This is digital strategy linked to powerful strategic programmes with real teeth.

My digital strategy for my own university runs to 2025, five years beyond the university’s current strategy, because the question I asked myself was not only how we could support what’s happening now but how can we inform the next planning cycle and be prepared to meet the challenge of change – both in the sector and the marketplace. It’s about raising the flag now and saying IT will have to be a key strategic theme in all future university strategies.

It’s a new role – and one all of us in IT leadership roles should take on with relish. It’s never been more important for universities to support their IT people, recognise their strategic importance and focus on the contribution of IT to the learner journey.

Taking best advantage of disruptive technology is an issue that goes beyond UCISA’s membership and is on the table for many people. But we’re here to play our part. UCISA’s own Strategic Plan provides for much greater engagement with IT staff at all levels in future. Student success is a business we are all in now and whether you work in IT or not, we’re here to signpost you not only to resources and best practice but a network of contacts that have been there, done that.

Key take-outs for CIOs:

• When crafting your institution’s digital strategy, consider the impact of digital in the broadest sense. An effective IT strategy should fully embrace its effective contribution to student success and student outcome

• Think beyond the current university business plan horizon. What trends and scenarios can new and emerging use of technology capitalise on in support of the student lifecycle

• Integrate the digital strategy with the institutional strategy – not least in the value added to the student journey and later student entry and contribution to the workplace

David TelfordUCISA Executive Chair and Director of Information Services Edinburgh Napier University

UCISA welcomes blog contributions from members. If you would like to contribute a new perspective on a current topic of interest, please contact the website team via manjit.ghattaura@it.ox.ac.uk

The views expressed on UCISA blogs are the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect those of UCISA.

The first session of Day 1 of the EDUCAUSE conference was from Dr Michio Kaku, a futurist, theoretical physicist and author. He spoke about his predictions for the future, the digitisation of society and commerce, although he admitted it is hard to predict the future. He suggested that the internet will be everywhere in the future, so we will view it in the same way we view electricity now. We will have the internet in contact lenses, meaning getting online will be as easy as blinking. This will mean we have information easily available to us, so in education memorising facts/figures will be less important with more focus on concepts being taught. He also spoke of lecturers roles becoming more of a mentoring one. Whilst it was thought provoking, some of it was rather science fiction.

DigPedLab Vancouver 2017 – Day 1

Beccy Dresden was funded to attend this event as a 2017 UCISA bursary winner

After lunch on Day 1 of DigPedLab (the catered food was probably the best I’ve ever had at any conference-type event, btw), we headed back into the classroom for more…

A ‘guest lecture’ from David White on the Visitors and Residents continuum gave me a chance to nurse my jetlag for a bit – not because it was boring, but because since experiencing a full V&R workshop delivered by David and Donna Lanclos in 2015, I’ve run several sessions on it myself at the OU. If you’re not familiar with V&R, https://www.youtube.com/ is a good place to start, but essentially it’s a counter to Prensky’s digital natives shtick.

Keynote: Rusul Alrubail

‘Educating for change: activism, organizing, and resisting through storytelling’

The following abstract describes Rusul’s session more eloquently than I can (emphasis added by me though):

“How do youth want to be supported by educators/adults in building and sustaining student movements? Social justice struggle grows from students’ own goals and feelings about their education, community and world. As educators it’s important that we provide the opportunity to cultivate and nurture student voice. The storyteller wields power in creating a story that allows the listener to empathize and understand and by doing so storytelling inadvertently becomes a mode to free ourselves from oppression. It is now more than ever a necessary time for us to focus on student activism and cultivate the necessary conditions for students to organize, and more importantly, to tell their stories for larger impact.”

Rusul covered an astonishing amount of ground and had most of the room in tears at some point after sharing her own experiences of emigration/immigration, followed by many examples of creative and inspiring student activism, such as:

#studentsnotsuspects – ‘schools should be like our second homes, not prisons’

Muslim Girls Making Change – a multicultural slam poetry activist group, founded because its members felt their voices were not heard in the classroom

She emphasised that it’s important as educators for us not to expect that students are willing or able to lose part of themselves to assimilate/conform to society’s norms, and talked about establishing a culture of connectivity – creating the right conditions for developing student voice, considering who’s listening in the classroom, and who’s speaking/who’s allowed to speak.

Rusul encouraged us to ‘connect globally with educators to disrupt the status quo’ and ‘shed light on injustice, even in our own communities – if we’re silent, we’re complicit’.

And relax…

Day 1 ended with a bit of socialising – first a reception at Kwantlen, and then somehow I ended up being the one to find a local restaurant that could accommodate a whole bunch of us! The food and beer were good, but the best part was getting to chat with participants from the other tracks.

DigPedLab Vancouver 2017 – Background

Beccy Dresden was funded to attend this event as a 2017 UCISA bursary winner

A bit about me….

I’m Beccy Dresden, a Senior TEL Designer (TEL = technology enhanced learning) at The Open University, where I’ve worked for nearly 18 years. I joined the OU from a professional publishing background, and have supported the development of modules on subjects as diverse as law, languages, social work, and English grammar.

My department – the TEL Design team – works in partnership with academic experts, Learning and Teaching Innovation portfolio colleagues, and students and tutors, to design, produce, support and evaluate OU modules. The team’s work draws on and contributes to the learning, teaching and innovation evidence base of the University, and embodies emerging technologies and research to reinforce the OU’s position as the UK leader in supported online and distance learning. The modules we produce are now digital by default, but we are keen to ensure that the online experience we offer our students is driven by pedagogy, not technology. Within the TEL Design team, my particular areas of interest and scholarship are:

the use of social media in HE (both in terms of student-facing content, and as a tool/platform in the continuing professional development (CPD) of academic and professional support staff), and

developing digital capabilities (again, in terms of both students and staff at the OU).

About DigPedLab Institutes

Ever since I applied for the UCISA bursary back in April, I’ve struggled to explain clearly and concisely to people quite what a DigPedLab Institute is – even those working in the ed tech sector have given me slightly puzzled looks – and each institute is slightly different, so it’s not even a single thing. To focus on the one I attended, in the organisers’ words:

“DPL Vancouver is a three-day institute that explores the role and application of digital technology in teaching. Three tracks offer intensive peer-driven learning with and discussion of open education, new media, and critical digital pedagogy.

Participants choose between one of three tracks and work collaboratively in small workshop-style classes. Each track is open to all backgrounds and skill levels. Each day of the institute begins with discussion that will play into the day’s work. A continental breakfast will be provided before sessions begin mid-morning, followed by lunch. Afternoons will be split into multiple sessions and will include keynote presentations, workshops, and other activities. Each day will end before dinner. The learning community we create together will be welcoming to a wide range of skill levels and interests.”

“focused on the development of participatory, networked literacies that enable collaboration, contribution, and critical sense-making within information abundance. It fosters a critical orientation toward tools, portfolios, and digital presence within networks. Participants will discuss and experiment with various technological tools from the chalkboard to moveable chairs, computers, mobile devices, social media platforms, and learning management systems. Individual sessions and workshops will focus on teaching philosophies, discernment practices for using digital tools in courses, emergent learning, digital composition, and discussions of the impact of the digital on traditional and critical pedagogies.”

Apart from wanting to be taught by Bonnie, whom I have long admired for her clear-sighted and thoughtful-yet-practical approach to complex digital pedagogy issues, I thought that learning about new critical perspectives for evaluating digital tools and approaches would be invaluable for me and my department.

My further blogs are really just an overview of an intense, inspiring, and challenging weekend that – nearly five months later – is still affecting how I approach my work and my social (media) interactions every day.

Emma Fletcher
Technology Enhanced Learning Advisor
York St John University

EDUCAUSE 2017

Emma Fletcher was funded to attend this event as a 2017 UCISA bursary winner

At the recent EDUCASE 2017 conference, which I was able to join courtesy of a UCISA bursary, I was able to attend a session on Active Learning Classrooms (ALCs), named by EDUCAUSE as the top strategic technology of 2017 due to the popularity and innovation of ALCs. Active learning classrooms (ALCs) are designed to create affordances that support active learning pedagogies (which research has demonstrated are better when compared with more passive types of learning).

Presented by D. Christopher Brooks and Malcolm Brown (from EDUCAUSE), Melody Buckner (University of Arizona), Adam Finkelstein (McGill University) and Sehoya Cotner (University of Minnesota), the session explored the research around ALCs as well as looking at the teaching practices that work best in them. There were examples from research, at the University of Minnesota, where the traditional teaching (large lectures) was compared with smaller ALC style teaching. This showed that students in traditional classrooms achieved as expected, however ALC students outperformed against their expected grades. One message that came out of the session was that potential of ALCs can only be realised if you have good teaching. Changing the space may mean that the instructor doesn’t know how to teach in the new space (teachers may try and use the traditional lecture style in the new spaces so, for example, students would have their back to lecturers) and active learning gains are achieved by academics teaching to fit the learning space.

Between 2014 and 2016, the University of Kentucky had opened 17 new Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL) spaces at the university and carried out an evaluation of the impact of these on teaching, student learning outcomes and retention. The data collected consisted of surveys from both students and instructors as well as classroom observations and course grades. The classroom observations (adapted from the University of Minnesota developed instrument) were timed observations where every five minutes they marked down what the students and instructor were doing.

The observations showed a great deal of variation between classes. The findings of the staff survey showed that 18% of staff did not plan to use active learning strategies and 29% of staff planned not to use the TEAL equipment. 126 of the courses taught in TEAL had enough data points for comparison, 35 of these courses had significant grade differences for all students (29 had a positive difference favouring the TEAL sections, six had a positive difference favouring the non-TEAL sections). When they looked at retention, they found that there was significant correlation between number of TEAL courses taken and second year retention. As a result they are increasing the support for staff to help support the use of TEAL, such as technology/pedagogy open houses, scheduled one-on-one support appointments, giving advance notice of classroom assignment and communicating about available support resources.

Before setting off for America, I downloaded the EDUCAUSE app, which was invaluable over the course of the conference. This allowed me to look at the agenda for the conference and start to identify some of the sessions I wanted to attend. The conference had general sessions as well as parallel sessions over the three days I was attending. The sessions were divided into tracks, with driving innovation in teaching and learning being the main one I focused on. Inevitably, whilst attending the sessions I chose, I worried I had selected the ‘wrong’ ones!

I arrived in Philadelphia a few days before the conference, to allow me to acclimatise and get my bearings. This was my first trip to America. Philadelphia itself is a lovely city – I would definitely recommend a visit.

The conference location was a short walk from my hotel, so I headed there bright and early on Wednesday morning to register and collect my badge (which I personalised with stickers at the ribbon station). The venue itself, the Philadelphia Convention Centre, was huge! My step count over the course of the conference can attest to this! The EDUCAUSE staff were friendly and welcoming, with someone on hand to point you in the right direction (which was likely with such a sprawling venue and a number of parallel presentations).

EUNIS 2017

Ed Stout was funded to attend this event as a 2017 UCISA bursary winner

Dr. Rob Abel, Chief Executive Officer of IMS Global Learning Consortium, came across from the USA to talk us through his thoughts on the future of Digital Learning Architecture in Higher Education at EUNIS 2017. He very quickly put strong emphasis on the importance of a digital transformation strategy within HE institutions and outlined that IT should be an enabler to teaching and learning innovation. Dr. Abel’s presentation had so much content, in truth it was difficult to keep up. He gave us an overview of the tools and technology in place within the HE market for teaching and learning as outlined in the photo below: (apologies for poor image quality)

An outdated architecture for learning had different systems uniquely silo-ed with little to no interoperability:

What if now it was quicker and easier to make systems work in harmony, to benefit the connected learner? Well, Dr. Abel, in collaboration with Malcolm Brown (EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative) and Jack Suess (University of Maryland), had previously written a paper in 2013 analysing “A New Architecture for Learning” which highlights the need for an IT department to be agile, flexible and allow for personalisation when integrating new innovative learning technologies. Seamless interoperability between both current and future developed systems is the key to success; not simply an over-reliance on a current Learning Management System (LMS), but an ecosystem developed beyond it. Dr Abel referenced a very useful paper produced by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative in 2015 entitled “The Next Generation Digital Learning Environment” which is worth your time to read and is available here

Dr. Abel then took the opportunity to take us on a high-speed tour of the benefits and impact of Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI), which include:

Reduced integration time and cost by a factor of 100-1000x

Ubiquitous across 70+ learning platforms

Hundreds of certified LTI apps of varying types

Foundation of interoperable edtech ecosystem.

IMS Global have publicly released Caliper, a learning analytics interoperability framework that enables the collection, storage and transportation of data about learning. The Caliper framework removes the limitations of a single LMS system and opens up a broad range of benefits to be realised through the integration and interoperability of multiple systems. It is worth noting that it is being taken seriously by many HE institutions and partners, so is not one to simply toss aside without further investigation.